New toy: iSight

iSight screencapture

So I went and got myself a new toy today — Apple’s iSight webcam. I haven’t done a ton of playing with it so far, but from what I have done, it’s quite the nifty little addition to my arsenal of toys.

The packaging is up to Apple’s usual standards of excellence. The box unfolds in half to reveal all the pieces: the iSight itself, a plastic carrying case, and three types of stands (one for sticking to the top of a CRT, one for sticking to the back of an LCD screen, and one for clipping to the top of a PowerBook). A FireWire cable is included, packaged underneath the camera.

Setting it up is incredibly simple — plug it in. Instantly, iChat recognizes it, and you’re ready to go!

I didn’t have anyone online who I could test a two-way video chat with, but I was able to test a one-way video chat (me broadcasting, them receiving) with audio going both directions, and it worked fine. The iSight has a microphone built in, so no extra cables or pieces are required to get the audio portion of the chat working.

After playing with iChat for a bit, I bounced into Yahoo! Messenger for a few moments. While Y!M doesn’t have anywhere near the speed or quality that iChat does, and doesn’t support voice chat on the Mac, it was able to recognize the iSight and allow for video/text chatting with other Y!M users without a hitch.

All in all, I’m quite impressed. It may not be the most practical toy that I could have picked up — especially with so few other iChat/iSight users in my sphere of influence at the moment — but it’ll be quite handy to have around at those times when I can take advantage of it.

Even Microsoft wants G5s

UPDATE: Please take the time to read my followup post, Fifteen Minutes of Fame, for my thoughts on what happened after I posted this picture, why it happened — and most importantly, why I don’t blame Microsoft for their actions. Thanks!


It looks like somebody over in Microsoft land is getting some new toys…

Microsoft's shipment of G5s come in

I took this shot on the way into work on the loading dock (MSCopy, the print shop I work in, is in the same building as MS’s shipping and receiving). Three palettes of Dual 2.0Ghz G5’s on their way in to somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond. Hopefully they’re all in good condition when they arrive — the boxes are slick enough that a few of them took a bit of a tumble (you can see them back in the truck)!

Panther preview in NYT

Apple Panther paw

There’s a glowing review of Apple’s new version of OS X (10.3, or ‘Panther’) in the New York Times today by David Pogue. A few things in the article jumped out at me.

First off, I love the logo they came up with to illustrate the story.

Then, in the first paragraph: “Hackers and academics have uncovered one Windows security hole after another, turning Microsoft into a frantic little Dutch boy at the dike without enough fingers.”

About the new ‘sidebar’ in the Finder, Pogue says that, “In effect, the Sidebar lets you fold up your desktop so that any two icons appear side-by-side, no matter how far apart they actually are in your folder hierarchy.” All of a sudden, I really want to rename the Finder ‘tesseract’.

And lastly, one of the last paragraphs comparing Apple’s OS philosophy to Microsoft’s sums it all up wonderfully.

Finally, surely there’s value in using an operating system that, well, isn’t Windows. Mac OS X isn’t just free of viruses; it’s also free from copy protection, “activation” (a Windows XP feature that transmits information about your PC back to Microsoft), and pop-up messages that nag you to sign up for some Microsoft database or clean up your icons. When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it’s yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you’re using someone else’s toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you.

Dr. Seuss…political cartoonist

I’d never heard this before, but it turns out that Dr. Seuss spent a couple years as a political cartoonist — and there’s a website that collects all of his published political cartoons.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) was a life-long cartoonist: in high school in Springfield, Massachusetts; in college at Dartmouth (Class of 1925); as an adman in New York City before World War II; in his many children’s books, beginning with To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (1937). Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.

Looking through them, it’s fascinating how dated some of the cartoons are, while others seem just as relevant today. Neat stuff.

(via Mike Wedland)

Voting Record for the 'Partial Birth' Abortion Ban bill

The list of who voted which way in the just passed “Partial Birth” Abortion Ban bill is available online.

Of the two states I pay the most attention to, both (Republican) Senators from Alaska (Murkowski and Stevens) voted Yea, while both (Democratic) Senators from Washington (Cantwell and Murray) voted Nay. Add one more reason to the list of reasons I prefer living here in Washington these days…

(via Tina)